In her thirties, Niamh Ennis became “the woman who lost everyone she ever loved”. This isn’t “melodramatic,” she explains, it’s just a fact. Her fiancé, her mother and then her father all died suddenly in a short time.
In conversation, she is bubbly yet stoic about the experience. “What happened to me happens to everyone. The only difference is that it all happened to me in a very short time,” she says.
In November 2005, weeks before her wedding, her fiancé Tony had gone on a golfing holiday with his friends before the big day. Two days later, he was doubled up in pain. The couple were called to a consultant’s office to be told he had pancreatic cancer. Nine days later, he died in her arms.
Niamh’s beloved father David, who had “stepped into hero mode” for his daughter in the months following Tony’s death, was called to the hospital and found a hole in his lung. He died six weeks later, in April 2006.
Tragedy struck again in 2012 when Niamh’s mother Marie suffered two heart attacks on Niamh’s birthday.
The day before her mother died, she looked up from her hospital bed and said, “I’m not getting ready to pop my clogs, am I?”
She can laugh at that now: “Oh, for God’s sake, the drama of it all!” But not long after, she sobbed in silence at the realization of what was happening: “I had never been so intensely alone before, or since.”
Now she works as a transformation coach and has a mission to help other people who are ‘stuck’ and ready for change. her new book, Let go: drop your drama and go from pain to power, is written without sentimentality, I say. “It’s interesting you picked that up,” she replies, “because I wrote another book before that was just for me — it was the book I had to write to get it all out of my system.”
There’s a time after life-changing events, she says, when you need to be “complacent” and clear emotions before moving on. But after doing that for years, she realized she was stuck and said, “I got hooked on sympathy.” She started to enjoy how people treated her. Her turning point came when she was comforted by a close friend one night and suddenly wondered aloud, “Am I milking this?”
“That moment was the starting point of this book. It’s when you get to that stage that you know you’re stuck and addicted to the drama or sympathy. I often talk about the head tilt, when you meet people and they ask how you’re doing and you’re almost like, ‘Great, now we’re back on familiar ground’. And again, please know I’m not talking about six months or a year. I’m talking about two or three years after that, when I knew I had completely lost myself in the grief.”
She believes that people can use the sense of ‘victimization’ to avoid the reality of a difficult situation and thus avoid taking ‘full responsibility’ for what happens next. She points to a trend she describes as ‘the commercialization of grief’.
“Whether it’s after a breakup, or losing money or a job or a loved one, it’s all relative – whatever your experience. As a culture, it’s brilliant that we all talk a lot more about what’s happening to us, but we have to be careful that we also talk about it from a ‘solution’ perspective. That’s where the strategy – the practical part – is important.”
Her book covers a wide variety of real life cases, from miscarriage to divorce. And it offers practical tools to move forward. “When I meet a customer for the first time, I ask them to ask themselves: am I really stuck here? And am I ready to change?
“If the answer is no, you have to wait until it feels right. If the answer is yes, you are ready to move on. The first question I usually ask people is, ‘If you didn’t have challenges and weren’t afraid and didn’t care what other people thought, what would you do? Not what other people want or expect from you.”
Niamh has since fallen in love and remarried. “My life is so boring right now, isn’t that great? That’s what I’ve dreamed of all these years,” she laughs.
“Look, the reality is that it’s always a risk and a gamble to love someone. But the alternative should be enough to get you moving forward. And I know that each of us has the strength to get through terrible times.”
‘Get Unstuck: Ditch Your Drama and Go From Pain to Power’ is available for pre-order at niahmennis.com/book and in bookstores starting November 11